Don’t you just hate acronyms?

It’s bad enough having to decode my kids’ text messages without industry experts bombarding me with terms like ARPU, KGOY, WiMAX, VoIP and MMORG.

Another acronym now in vogue is BRIC – a term first coined in 2003 by an analyst at Goldman Sachs. Shorthand for Brazil, Russia, India and China, it seems to have cropped up in a lot of interviews with WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell this year. It has even spawned a charmless spin-off – neo-BRIC – which is used as a catch-all for markets like Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Anyway, here’s the thing. Goldman Sachs noticed that the BRIC countries all had big populations and were poised to enjoy a lengthy phase of economic growth. It also realized that these countries either controlled or consumed vast quantities of natural resources. So it lumped them together to create BRIC – an intellectual construct which feels as though it ought to mean something, but has no value other than to remind North America and the European Union that their hegemony is waning.

True, BRIC heads of state get together now and then to compare growth curves, but there is such a cultural, political and geographic disconnect between these titans that anything other than the most superficial sideways glance shows BRIC to be a meaningless term. As for neo-BRIC, it sounds like something LEGO is about to pitch to retailers.

Having said all this, these four countries are all increasingly important players in the global media space, so let’s do a quick spot check on what the BRICies were doing at MIPTV in Cannes.

The Chinese were clearly in the ascendancy. With the country’s economy expected to experience growth of 6% this year, it sent a record 300 delegates from 90 companies to France. Not only that, but there was a strong government presence – led by Tian Jin, vice-minister of media ministry SARFT. The point about this is that there seemed to be an officially endorsed desire to maintain momentum built up by the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

This was evident in a couple of ways. Firstly, in attempts to encourage Western producers to work more closely with Chinese animation studios. Secondly, in the launch of Vision Ventures Media, a JV between China-based Asian Union and FremantleMedia Enterprises, designed to increase the trade of factual programming to and from China.

The Indian presence at MIP was much more low-key than in 2008 – which may be something to do with the country’s sluggish economy. Although India is expected to achieve 5% growth this year, its economic fundamentals are not as strong as China’s. Corruption, bureaucracy, poverty and lack of foreign exchange reserves are all reasons why India is not as formidable a global force as China.

Having said that, it is much easier to do business on the ground in India than in China (in a regulatory sense). Right now, the Hindi pay-TV sector is booming – with U.S. majors such as Disney, NBC Universal, Viacom and Turner crawling all over the channel business. The result is that format specialists like Endemol and BBC Worldwide have also set up shop in the market. Canada has some format producers, but more interesting to the country’s production community should be the rise of the Indian animation sector.

At MIP, India’s DQ Entertainment joined forces with ZDF Enterprises on a 52-part CGI version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Soon after, DQE popped up again as part of a US$23-million Little Prince copro which involves Method Animation, France 3, WDR, Sony BMG and RAI.

Canadian producers have also done copros with India and sent delegations to explore opportunities for collaboration, but the sad fact is that co-operation between the two is hampered by the lack of a Canada-India copro treaty (despite it being discussed for years). The message from MIP is that both sides could do with movement on this front.

Brazilian growth will drop from 5% per annum to 2% this year. But there’s no question that the economy is in much better shape than it has been since, well, before the Portuguese arrived.

In TV terms, the major shift has been in the behavior of dominant broadcaster-producer group Globo. Long seen as an exporter of telenovelas, Globo has diversified its distribution activities to cover comedy, drama and factual. At the same time, its pay-TV subsidiary Globosat has become a significant player in terms of factual acquisitions. When you also recall that Brazilian pubcaster TV Brasil has $40 million to spend on docs, it’s clear that this is a country worth getting to know.

By contrast, financial analysts are less enthusiastic about Russia. Discovery has entered the market and telenovelas are still in demand, but with the Russian economy in a sharp slump, money for formats and coproduction is now scarce. In fact, better bets than Russia right now could be Poland, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria and Turkey.

The only problem with these is that PUNT is an even uglier acronym than BRIC. Still, remember where you heard it first.